Avery Bradley Becoming The NBA’s Premier Perimeter Defender

Night in and night out, Boston Celtics shooting guard Avery Bradley continues to defend the notion that he is the most formidable defensive stalwart in the NBA.

On Thursday night in Boston’s 116-109 loss to Portland, Bradley suffocated one of the league’s premier scorers, Damian Lillard, for 35 minutes, holding the owner of a 25.2 points per game average to just 14 points on horrid 3-16 shooting from the field.

Then, just one night later, facing potentially the most dominant team in NBA history and the bearers of a 54-game home winning streak in the Golden State Warriors, Bradley brought the same defensive intensity as he did a mere 24 hours before in another strenuous 35 minutes of playing time.

The Texas product spent his Friday night stay in the Bay Area ruthlessly chasing defending MVP Stephen Curry and dangerous deep threat Klay Thompson off of the three-point line, playing the two as effectively as anyone in the league could wish to.

Ruling out a 21-point third quarter in which Isaiah Thomas was frequently matched up against him, Curry scored just eight points in the other three stanzas while shooting a porous 2-8 from three, horrendous by his standards, while Thompson made just six of his 16 field goal attempts on the night for 15 points in 37 minutes.

While Bradley has been cementing his reputation as one of the league’s feature perimeter defenders throughout his tenure in Boston, what makes his case for All-Defensive First Team honors even more compelling is that his peers are beginning to take notice.

After his shutdown effort against Lillard, who he has limited to just 34% shooting from the field and 28% shooting from three-point range through their seven meetings, the Weber State product had nothing but praise for the smothering defender.

“He’s quick,” Lillard told Boston.com. “He’s strong. Good anticipation. And a lot of guys just, people say they’re defenders. They look like defenders on some possessions, but that’s what he does. That’s what he wants to do. He’s there every possession. He doesn’t get screened. He’s tough. You’ve got to give credit where it’s due.”

While Bradley does rank in the top 25 in the league in steals per game with an average of 1.5, it is the immeasurable aspects of his defensive approach that make him so valuable, such as recognizing the presence of an oncoming screener and hopping over the screener before he can even set up his pick, making his matchup uncomfortable with relentless, in-your-face defense, and beating his matchup to the spot in whichever way they dribble.

Just watch Bradley on any given outing, and you will witness the intangibles that set him apart from most of the perimeter defenders in the NBA. The 6’2″, 180-pounder never takes a play off regardless of who he is defending, constantly locking off his man while making it difficult for them to get the ball.

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Bradley provides the Celtics with tremendous flexibility in terms of matchups as well. With his ability to limit the opposition’s most dynamic perimeter threat on any given night, he takes the onus off of Thomas on defense (except in cases in which the opposition features two scoring guards in the starting lineup such as Golden State), allowing him to expend the majority of his energy on the offensive end, where he inflicts the most damage.